Ferrol Aubrey Sams, Jr. in the Southern Quote

He was born September 26, 1922 in Fayette County, Georgia. He graduated from Mercer University in Macon in 1942 and attended Emory University School of Medicine for two quarters before joining the U.S. Army Medical Corps. After seeing action in France he returned home to complete his medical studies, receiving his M.D. in 1949.

In addition to practicing medicine with his physician wife Helen, our featured southerner taught creative writing at Emory and was an instructor at Emory Medical School. Though a physician by trade, he would become more widely known as an author.

Ferrol Aubrey Sams, Jr. was a young sixty years old when he began his writing career. Sams is said to have begun by taking down notes for a family history so he could tell his four children and ten grandchildren what it was like to grow up in rural Georgia between the two world wars. His thoughts became a popular trilogy. “Run with the Horsemen” was the first of the semiautobiographical adventures of his main character, Porter Osborne Jr. An eccentric and quixotic hero, Porter mirrored Ferrol’s own boyhood growing up in rural Georgia. The second book in the Porter trilogy was “The Whisper of the River,” and it recounted Porter’s coming of age. Faced with writer’s block about how to continue with Porter’s story Sams followed with a book of short stories and two nonfiction works until 1991 when he returned to Porter Osborne Jr. with the publication of “When All The World Was Young.” That volume won the Townsend Prize for Fiction.

In 2007 Sams was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and in 2012 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Georgia Writers Association at the tender age of 90.

In today’s Southern Quote we honor a man whose fiction celebrates love of the land, the changing southern landscape and what he calls “being raised right” in the rural south.